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Ask Smithsonian 2017

Why Does the Durian Fruit Smell So Terrible?

Scientists examine what chemicals make the Asian fruit smell like “turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock”

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The Insane Amount of Biodiversity in One Cubic Foot

David Liittschwager travels to the world’s richest ecosystems, photographing all the critters that pass through his “biocube” in 24 hours

The doodle that became Twitter

8 Ways People Are Taking Twitter Seriously

Born in desperation and long mocked, the social media platform has become a popular research and intelligence-gathering tool

Flipping a coin isn't as fair as it seems.

Gamblers Take Note: The Odds in a Coin Flip Aren’t Quite 50/50

And the odds of spinning a penny are even more skewed in one direction, but which way?

After decades of uncertainty, a new study confirms that both polar ice sheets are melting.

Confirmed: Both Antarctica and Greenland Are Losing Ice

After decades of uncertainty, a new study confirms that both polar ice sheets are melting

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Why Did Plant-Munching Theropods Get So Big?

Were these Late Cretaceous dinosaurs just the culmination of an evolutionary trend towards ever-larger body size or was something else at work?

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The 2012 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Awards Liveblog

Follow along as we award the best innovators of the year

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Why Do We Hiccup? And Other Scientific Mysteries—Seen Through the Eyes of Artists

In a new book, 75 artists illustrate questions scientists haven’t fully answered yet

Archaeopteryx had a wing that was different from that of modern birds, and, as seen here, might have been a glider more than a powered flyer.

Feathers Fuel Dinosaur Flight Debate

Was the early bird Archaeopteryx more of a glider than a flier?

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Primate Origins Tied to Rise of Flowering Plants

Scientists argue that grasping hands and feet, good vision and other primate adaptations emerged because the mammals plucked fruits from the ends of tree branches

An artist’s rendering of the matter ejected from the quasar SDSS J1106+1939 surrounding a black hole.

Astronomers Discover the Most Explosive Black Hole Yet

The newly discovered quasar spews an amount of energy equivalent to more than two million suns

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Shopping Gets Personal

Retailers are mining personal data to learn everything about you so they can help you help yourself to their products.

Principles from the weather models that predicted Sandy a week ahead of time might be used to warn about the flu before it arrives.

How Weather Models and Google Could Help Forecast Flu Season

Principles from the weather models that predicted Sandy a week ahead of time might be used to warn about the flu before it arrives

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What is Genyodectes?

A set of partial jaws hold an important place in the history of South American paleontology, but what sort of dinosaur do they represent?

A restoration of Gigantspinosaurus.

G is for Gigantspinosaurus

Gigantspinosaurus had enormous shoulder spikes, but what were these ornaments used for?

A partial Homo antecessor skull that was unearthed at the Gran Dolina cave site in the Atapuerca Mountains of Spain.

Homo antecessor: Common Ancestor of Humans and Neanderthals?

A hominid that lived in Europe more than a million years ago might have given rise to Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, some anthropologists say

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Beavers On Parachutes

Beavers On Parachutes

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Stegosaurus Plate Debate

Stegosaurus is immediately recognizable for its prominent plates, but why did these structures actually evolve?

The system uses a grid of surgically implanted electrodes to enable a blind person to “see” the letters.

New Device Digitally Projects Braille Directly onto Blind Patient’s Retina

The system uses surgically implanted electrodes so that a blind person can “see” the letters

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What Kind of Dinosaur is Coming to Dinner?

Everyone knows that birds are dinosaurs, but what kind of dinosaur is your holiday turkey?

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